Jxnblk

The web doesn’t suck. Your websites suck. All of your websites suck. You destroy basic usability by hijacking the scrollbar. You take native functionality (scrolling, selection, links, loading) that is fast and efficient and you rewrite it with ‘cutting edge’ javascript toolkits and frameworks so that it is slow and buggy and broken. You balloon your websites with megabytes of cruft. You ignore best practices. You take something that works and is complementary to your business and turn it into a liability.

Sure, an app that put the bus on a map would be more rich in information, but when I got to texting Bus Time I thought, ‘Thank god I don’t need to download another fucking app for this.’

Many think updating apps for iOS7/8 is a simple task, but with all the custom UI we have, it requires redoing the app from scratch which is months of work.

Instrumented prototypes can really only get you to local maxima — they can help you find ways to tweak and optimize the basic design you’ve got, but they can never help you find a radically different and better solution.

The mobile web is not a technical thing – it is a misconception and one that is hard to match. Companies nowadays start with a native experience. This is where the short-term gain is. This is where the short-term high user numbers lie. This is the beautiful technology – the shiny devices, the backing from OS vendors and the exciting interaction models that come with the OS. It feels good, it feels that there is something to work with. Then these people hear about the benefits of web technologies: cross-platform support, lower cost of engineering as you don’t need to pay experts of red-hot new technologies, re-use across different form factors and so on. A lot of times this happens when the honeymoon period of the native solution is over and there is new growth to be unearthed.

This is why I would work hard to avoid any “Us vs Them” rhetoric. Much the opposite, I would argue all developers should aim to achieve a combination of engineering and craftsmanship. Engineers should strive for creativity, think out of the box, break rules when needed or better, know when to compromise on purity and keep in touch with the end value at all times. Craftsmen should embrace higher levels of abstraction, and they should aim for maintainability, DRY and learning new patterns and languages, which will only give them more power to express themselves and to create efficiently.

If we do everything client-side we do not only need to deliver innovative, new interfaces. We also need to replicate the already existing functionality the web gives us. A web site that takes too long makes the browser show a message that the site is not available and the user can re-try. When the site loads, I see a spinner. Every time we replace this with a client-side call, we need to do a lot of UX work to give the user exactly the same functionality.